Plain Speaking, Rhetoric and Outlandish Concatenations: African Literature and Its Critics

In: African affairs: the journal of the Royal African Society, Band 94, Heft 376, S. 413-420

Abstract

A review essay on seven books about African literature (see listings in IRPS No. 84). Questions of language are manifest in each of these books. First of all, many African writers emerge from complex linguistic backgrounds, as Derek Wright's The Novels of Nuruddin Farah makes apparent. Equally important, critics vary in their knowledge of & assumptions about the languages of Africa, as both Chantal Zabus & Kenneth H. Harrow demonstrate in different ways in The African Palimpset & Thresholds of Change in African Literature, respectively. Adewale Maja-Pearce's A Mask Dancing & Chris Dunton's Make Man Talk True show that linguistic traditions help shape the kinds of fiction & drama that are produced. Finally, Abdulrazak Gurnah's edited volume, Essays on African Writing, reminds us of the diversity of African writers & languages, & Eckhard Breitinger's edited volume, Theatre and Performance in Africa, reminds us that a popular literature must, by definition, employ a language with which its readers, hearers, & participants can engage. M. Maguire